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5 Responses

Personally, I wouldn't worry about redirecting a handful of pages that have been 404ing for 6-7 years. Odds are they don't rank for anything, Google has removed them from the index and they'll have little to no traffic going to them. Though I don't think they'll hurt you if you were to redirect them to a relevant live page... I just don't think you'll gain much from doing so.

If you have old pages that still exist but are no longer relevant - you'll definitely want to 301 redirect them to the new page or new content. Check Open Site Explorer to see what type of inbound links these pages have, so you know what type of Page Authority you'll have pointing at your new page.

If the pages no longer exist (404 as Mike suggested above), there will be no benefit from 301 redirecting them to new pages, as Google has long since removed these pages from their index. It won't hurt you, but it won't benefit you either, so it's probably not worth the time.

Odds are along the way that if the site is authority than it has picked up a good link or two to those pages. I would always 301 redirect to the most appropriate fresh page, unless the content was not evergreen (newsletter, paste events that are not relevant to the company and they no longer need to archive that information)

It should be easy to install a 404 page that records the agent and if you notice googlebot is still hitting these pages, no harm in 301ing them to let google know that we have moved and it doesn't need to bother about this urls anymore.

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